Yeah I think the risk is completely overblown but after the controversy over COVID and Wuhan gain of function research, bioethics discourse seems to have taken a conservative turn.
Long before we’d be able to bootstrap a fully mirrored organism we’d have to develop synthetic biotech that could easily weaponize something already scary like ebola or hendra virus. Synthetic organisms have so far been paired down versions of existing bacteria, not engineered and assembled from the ground up. Once we’re capable of the latter, mirror organisms are just one entry on a very long list of existential threats.
I think the real risk in the foreseeable future is horizontal gene transfer of chiral checkpoint proteins. In order to insert even a single nontrivial D protein into the genome, we’d have to modify the proteins that make sure everything is L-handed. If those managed to escape into the wild, the results would be completely unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. Bacteria mutate and evolve much faster than mammals so if any of them develop surface proteins that are functionally equivalent but D-handed, they could become resistant to antibiotics and our immune systems.
